25th Hall of Fame

Heh, heh. There was nothing wrong with Gould's performance per se, it's just that it bore no resemblance to the Marlowe in Chandler's novels.

The Green Years: This had really good cinematography, and I thought the score was fun. The script is pretty bad though. A couple people said they thought scenes were missing, so that was definitely in my head watching. I think I would have said the editing was choppy. There is really no sense of time, and it’s certainly jarring at times. No motivation for that ending either. That may be the point, but it’s a poorly executed one.

If someone doesn’t mind sending me a Themroc link, I will finish up this week.

Thank you Citizen and Cricket for the links. Forgot t mention I got them.

Themroc: Don’t really have anything interesting to say. I laughed at one part. When the man across the way tries to seduce a bricklayer the way the protagonist did. That gave me a nice chuckle.

Sending my list today. Very good HOF

I feel like a slacker because I didn't watch anything for this all weekend. I only have two films left though, so it probably won't take me long to finish up as well.

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American Movie -

Is Mark Borchardt a bootstrapping hidden talent who inspires and brings out the best in those in his inner circle? Is he a dreamer unwilling to accept that he's a never-was and is ultimately a master manipulator? That's for you to decide in American Movie, a documentary I very much enjoyed that sort of plays out like a real-life Ed Wood. While it succeeds at a lot of things, it's at its best when it exposes the harsh reality of getting a movie made, i.e. an independently financed one as a debt-addled adult with a family. From Mark's joy at being approved for a credit card to begging his mother to be an extra to being forced to take the kind of menial job he repeatedly rails against, it's not hard to see where his more practical and naysaying father and his brother Chris come from. The most interesting parts of Mark's struggle to finish Coven, however, are in the scenes where he spends time with his Uncle Bill. Besides recalling the relationship in Ed Wood between the director and Bela Lugosi, it captures that dichotomy I mentioned earlier about Mark better than anything else in the movie. After all, while he probably couldn't have finished his movie without Bill's money, Mark gives him company, a sense of purpose and shares his dream with him in the process. Other touches I appreciate are seeing clips of the finished product and how they call back to the making of scenes, thus making me appreciate the blood, sweat, tears and good luck that went into them. There's also Mark's clearly inspired reactions to the Oscars and the Packers winning the Super Bowl - a moment this Packer fan was happy to relive - for how they reminded me that such events push the notion of the American dream and that anyone can make theirs happen. As this movie demonstrates, however, doing so is not the romantic and individualistic affair they lead us to believe. It requires a lot of good luck, generous relatives like Bill, devoted friends like Mike and Ken and is a generally messy and exhausting affair.

By the way, this reminds me a lot of Anvil: The Story of Anvil, which is one of my favorite movies.

I rewatched The Long Goodbye today. I had seen it once a few years back, but didn't remember everything about it, so it was nice to revisit it. The Long Goodbye is a smart and entertaining film with a strong screenplay. I really liked Elliott Gould's performance here and was engaged and satisfied by the film. I liked the look and feel of the film. For me, this is Altman's 6th best film. My rating is a .

Les Misérables (1935) -

I'm glad this film was nominated, because, other than the 2012 film which I really like in spite of some backlash it's gotten over the years, I haven't seen any other adaptations of Victor Hugo's novel. While this version isn't without its flaws, I enjoyed my time with it quite a bit for a few reasons. For one, I appreciated the extra emphasis on Javert. By pushing his character more to the forefront than Hooper's film did, it helped me to see how compelling the conflict between Jean and Javert is, providing a heavy dose of suspense to the film in the first half, while exploring Javert's philosophies and vulnerabilities in the second half. The strong performances from both March and Laughton helped in this regard. I also enjoyed some other things about the film, like its bleak portrait of France at the time this film took place, the strong emotional connection I formed with several characters in the film, and the various action scenes (I found the chase scene at the end of the first half of the film and the barricade sequence to be technically impressive). With that being said, I thought the second half of the film was weaker than the first half. Once the film jumped ahead several years to show Cosette as an adult, the pacing increased by a decent margin, as if the film was in a hurry to finish up. Due to this, several scenes either felt rushed or abrupt, like Cosette's and Marius's relationship, and the final scene. Including some more breathing room for those scenes would've helped. In spite of this, however, I still enjoyed the film quite a lot.

Next up: The Long Goodbye

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IMDb
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Nope. I'm the slacker

Really I haven't had a lot of time for movies.

Bicycle Thieves (1948)

I watched this many years ago and I confess that I didn’t get the hype. It is a fairly straightforward story after all: man recovers his bike from a pawn shop because he needs it for his job. The bike is stolen. The man spends the rest of the film unsuccessfully searching for the bike. So what’s the big deal?

Here the second watch was critical for me. Knowing the plot allowed me to focus on what the film is really about: poverty, cruelty, and the resilience of the human spirit.

Post-war Italy is beset with intense deprivation. Jobs are scarce. The line between secure and ruined is perilously thin. Unemployed Antonio Ricci is lucky: he finds a job hanging up posters around town, but there’s a catch: he needs a bike. He had one but recently pawned it to survive. He scrambles to recover the bike, pawning his linens. But it is worth it:*now he is a working man - he has regular income, purpose, and an identity. Unfortunately, the bike is stolen while he is hanging up a poster. A frenzied, fruitless chase ensues. The next day he, his friends, and his son Bruno canvass Rome for the bike.

Antonio has the steely determination of the starving. The bike is his ticket to a bearable life. He will go to nearly any length to recover it. Badgering an old man, accusing a vendor of theft, and even following a teen into his apartment to accuse him.

Throughout the search, which takes up the bulk of the runtime, we are drawn to the son Bruno. His face is inordinately expressive. He suffers with his father, feeling everything his father is and deeply internalizing it. Neither actor is a professional - they are real people cast, as almost everyone in the film is, for their raw look and transparent feeling. This proves to be a stroke of genius; their haunted faces pierce our cynicism and engage our empathy.

What I missed the first time was the poignancy of the mundane. A bike seems like such a minor thing but to this family it is the difference between eating and going to bed hungry. Indeed, in the film’s most powerful sequence at the end, we see that this is so not just for this family but for myriad families. A desperate poor man steals the bike and ruins Antonio because he is a desperate poor man. And the sequence repeats. Deprivation turns the poor against each other and dooms then to perpetual penury.

Bicycle Thieves is perhaps the most famous neorealist film and it exemplifies the form. We get the pains of real life portrayed through real people in everyday situations and a story to thread it all together. It is an enormously affecting film that deserves the praise it so often receives. 10/10.

I'm waiting for that film I initially didn't care for to wow me the second time. Bicycle Thieves was not that for me.

I watched The Green Years tonight. I hadn't seen any of the director's other films and only a few films from Portugal so I'm glad I got a chance to see it. I thought the cinematography was the best part. The actors did a decent job, but I couldn't get invested in the characters. I think the characters could have been better developed. I didn't find the story very interesting and the film dragged at times. Overall, not a bad film, but not great either. This is a for me.

I'm not sure I totally got the ending either. When

Regardless, whether it's strange editing or scenes missing, I felt out of the loop a lot of the time. I still liked it and I'm glad to check Portugal off my list of countries from which I've seen at least one movie.

On a totally unrelated topic, has there ever been a documentary Hall of Fame?

Les Miserables



It's cool to see an old school adaptation of this. There's a lot of these movies but the only one I saw prior was Tom Hooper's and yeah I really like that one. I think watching this one makes me appreciate Hooper's more actually. It's a really good story and this 1935 version is no different. Apparently there were quite a bit of differences between the novel and the 1935 version, so it was cool to see it get its own angle so to say. It couldn't have been pulled off as admirably though without the strong performances of Fredric March and of course Charles Laughton as Javert, who is basically strong in anything that he tries to pull off. The film has a lot of flaws, but they can often be overlooked. Things like the courts scenes were drawn out too far and almost made me lose interest. But overall I consider this a pretty solid adaptation of the original novel, which maybe someday I'll even want to read myself. This was really well made for it's time, when if it feels a bit dated.

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We had one quite a while ago now. I would definitely be down for another if you wanted to do one. You can find the link it Citizen’s archive thread. Exit Through The Giftshop won.

Cool, and good choice. Not sure if I'd want to run it, but I'm also down for one if someone else does.

I haven’t run one in a while, but I might put some feelers out in a few weeks. The first one was fun.

I don’t think we had to do it for the doc, but if we only got a few people, we could do two noms each.